>On the other hand, my attempt at large scale beekeeping (500 hives) failed. I couldn't make it pay, with the 1980s prices. I sold the bees and didn't own bees again for ten years.
This type of comment is typical for someone with a poor understanding of economics. They believe the solution is simply to throw more money at the problem, while ignoring the real issues.
I find it very difficult to believe that the problem was 1980's prices, and suggesting that prices were the problem is misinformation. (This is supposed to be the informed beekeeping list.)
If the problem was 1980's prices, then other beekeepers would have faced the same obstacles and would have went belly up too.
The fact that there was a buyer available to buy your hives (a buyer who was selling into the same market prices as you) shows that it was not only possible to be profitable at 1980's prices, it was profitable enough to invest in expansion.
The problem wasn't the prices.
What were other successful beekeepers doing that you weren't doing? Therein lies the real reason for failure. You may not have been doing anything wrong - it's that you weren't doing the necessary things right. And odds are, those successful beekeepers didn't do everything right - but the things they did right, were enough to offset the things they did wrong.
When I was a young man, I took a correspondence course in Successful Investing and Money Management. One of the best pieces of advice that course offered was to surround yourself with successful people. Back then, only 4% of the USA population earned $100K+ a year. The course asked the rhetorical question that if I wanted to earn $100K+ a year, should I seek out and find the 4% to get investment and money advice from, or should I turn to the 96% that aren't able to earn the big bucks? Yet, where do most folks turn for advice?
One of my mentors is in his early 90's. He farmed, financed some oil wells, and worked for the farm bureau. He has said over and over that every farmer he worked with did something right. No matter how many bad things they did, they always did something right. He tried to learn from the things that folks did right.
This guy is a multimillionaire, and his highlight in life is going to a local restaurant with his wife a few times a week. He lives very simply, and has more money than he knows what to do with.
One of the houses I own is in a small village. This man recently purchased the house next door to the one I own. A few days ago, contractors were digging trenches for cement footers to put a house trailer in the backyard. When you talk to the man about all the trailers he sticks in the backyards of the town lots he owns, he just smiles and says it is an easy $400 a month. He charges $400 a month rent for a trailer, and no one bats an eye. It makes me look at the backyard of my town lot - there's enough room I could stick a house trailer back there. It's a tax foreclosure property I bought - I could rent the house, rent the 38 by 50 shop, and I could rent a trailer. Hmm.
This man also has been known to lend folks money to buy a house, and he gives them a mortgage. They get a better interest rate than a bank will give them, and he earns a higher interest rate than the bank will pay him. He is selective in who he loans to, and the amounts he will loan out, but it works for him.
You can learn a lot from this man's successes.
When I was younger, a guy I knew had broken up with his girlfriend, and needed a place to stay, so I let him live with me for a year or so. He ended up getting a job spicing fiber optic lines. In time, he started his own fiber optic splicing company. Then he started buying rental properties, and now he has 16 or 18 rentals.
This previous spring, his father retired, and handed him the reins of a family business that rents out yard barns.
The guy is 38 years old, and worth about $2 million.
You could learn a lot from this man's successes. (And you can learn a lot from this man's dad's successes - his dad also started or co-started a couple multi-million dollar businesses.)
I recall a story about a California beekeeper. When he was 14 years old, his older brother went to college. The 14 year old boy got to take care of his brother's 2 hives. After his brother got out of college, he gave his brother his 2 hives back...and younger brother kept his 400 hives.
Younger brother ended up going to college to study economics. Over time, he also his fingers in a heavy equipment rental business. He also developed his own pollen supplement, which he also sells to out of state beekeepers when they come to California.
He's running about 3000 hives now. He shakes bulk bees and sells them to package producers. He does almond pollination. After almonds, he sends his hives to honey locations. He doesn't complain about how bad beekeeping is - he scratches his head and wonders why other beekeepers aren't rolling in the bucks.
You could learn a lot from this man's successes.
A few years ago I helped a commercial beekeeper for a season. We installed around 600 2 pound packages. In May, we split the strong hives, and ended up with about 820 hives. That year, his average yield was 196 pounds of honey per hive. 161,000 pounds of honey. Then he sold the blow bees. His average over the past 5 years is over 150 pounds per hive. Not too shabby for a stationary honey producer who stills pulls honey by hand, loading it in the back of his half ton pickup truck.
You could learn a lot from this man's successes.
Find those elusive successful people and learn from success. It's much more productive than wasting time, energy, and resources trying to learn from failures.
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